arXiv subjects

Philip James Purnell

Publications and source records attributed to Philip James Purnell.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Transdisciplinary research: How much is academia heeding the call to work more closely with societal stakeholders such as industry, government, and nonprofits?

Transdisciplinary research, the co-creation of scientific knowledge by multiple stakeholders, is considered essential for addressing major societal problems. Research policy makers and academic leaders frequently call for closer collaboration between academia and societal stakeholders to address the grand challenges of our time. This bibliometric study evaluates progress in collaboration between academia and three societal stakeholders: industry, government, and nonprofit organisations. It analyses the level of co-publishing between academia and these societal stakeholders over the period 2013-2022. We found that research collaboration between academia and all stakeholder types studied grew in absolute terms. However, academia-industry collaboration declined 16% relative to overall academic output while academia-government and academia-nonprofit collaboration grew at roughly the same pace as academic output. Country and field of research breakdowns revealed wide variance. In light of previous work, we consider potential explanations for the gap between policymakers' aspirations and the real global trends. This study is a useful demonstration of large scale, quantitative bibliometric techniques for research policymakers to track the impact of decisions related to funding, intellectual property law, and nonprofit support.

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arXiv2023

Geodiversity of Research: A Comparison of Geographical Topic Focus and Author Location using SDG 2: Zero Hunger as a Case Study

This study examined the geodiversity of research through comparing topic focus with author location using SDG 2: Zero hunger as a case study. As the research was related to hunger, papers were mapped on to the Global Hunger Index country categories as convenient classification. The publication dataset comprised 60,000 papers from the Dimensions database that have been associated with hunger research using Digital Science machine learning algorithm that enhances expert led search strategies. Only 41% hunger-related publications that focus on countries most affected by hunger feature authors affiliated to institutions in those countries. Even fewer of those publications feature locally based authors in first or last position. These numbers gradually reverse as the level of hunger declines. We analyse sample papers in an attempt to understand the reasons for these trends. These included differences in research infrastructure, sub-authorship recognition such as acknowledgements, and limitations of the relationship between country mention and real topical focus. We did not find evidence of widespread differences between senior and overall authorship and consequently urge caution before judging international collaborations as helicopter research based only on author country affiliations and authorship position.

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arXiv2022

A comparison of different methods of identifying publications related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Case Study of SDG 13: Climate Action

As sustainability becomes an increasing priority throughout global society, academic and research institutions are assessed on their contribution to relevant research publications. This study compares four methods of identifying research publications related to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13: climate action. The four methods, Elsevier, STRINGS, SIRIS, and Dimensions have each developed search strings with the help of subject matter experts which are then enhanced through distinct methods to produce a final set of publications. Our analysis showed that the methods produced comparable quantities of publications but with little overlap between them. We visualised some difference in topic focus between the methods and drew links with the search strategies used. Differences between publications retrieved are likely to come from subjective interpretation of the goals, keyword selection, operationalising search strategies, AI enhancements, and selection of bibliographic database. Each of the elements warrants deeper investigation to understand their role in identifying SDG-related research. Before choosing any method to assess the research contribution to SDGs, end users of SDG data should carefully consider their interpretation of the goal and determine which of the available methods produces the closest dataset. Meanwhile data providers might customise their methods for varying interpretations of the SDGs.

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